Author Archive
Those poor hackers. Imagine not getting credit for your work when it goes on to fame, anonymity being recommended for staying out of prison. And no matter how clever a moniker you cook up for your creation, you’d know it’s destined for oblivion, since the privilege of naming it goes to those who detect it. […]
Perhaps you heard: Newspapers have had a tough time making the transition from print to digital. The good news is that for some papers that’s starting to turn around. When digital publishing first became a thing, most papers made content available online for free. The idea was to supplement printed editions, the industry’s mainstay. What […]
DON’T GET me wrong. I like competition. Honest I do. But that’s not to say that it doesn’t have its occasional downside. In the news media in particular, competition for audience share inevitably makes a priority of pressing hot buttons, often at the expense of putting things in perspective. Take this recent CBS DFW headline: […]
A NUMBER OF notable companies now accept Bitcoin, albeit usually via an intermediary like Coinbase or BitPay. Yet one Bitcoin use in particular seems to be catching on in a big way. “By most estimates,” PBS Newshour reported in 2014, “more than half of global Bitcoin transactions are wagers on gambling sites.” To explain the […]
In Umberto Eco’s 1988 novel Foucault’s Pendulum, the protagonist tries to access a friend’s computer only to come up against the prompt, “Do you know the password?” After umpteen unsuccessful attempts, the exasperated protagonist types, “No.” Which unlocks the computer. You might think, Get real, Umberto, what kind of nitwit uses an easily-guessed password like […]